by samGoogle has been trying to get into the whole social market for a little while. Think back a few years when they unveiled Google Wave, which was Google’s social tool for collaborative work and sharing. Though many argued that it was too complicated and had too much going on to be successful, in 2010, Google killed it off. Also, Google tried out Google Buzz, which was not too dissimilar to Twitter but with Gmail integration, though it was heavily criticised for its privacy issues.
Elements of buzz are still being used in some products. This time Google has started pushing Google Plus as a full-blown social network, with its sights firmly set on Twitter and Facebook, but is it the next big thing or another wave of failure?
To date, Google has a huge repertoire of services and products, to name a few: Gmail, Docs, Picasa, YouTube, Android, and Chrome, but their main product and greatest success is the Google.com search engine. Google Plus is the next step in unifying all of these products and getting people to become completely invested in Google’s ecosystem.
Plus has learnt from all the mistakes and successes of Wave and Buzz. For starters, it is extremely simple to use. They plan to revolutionise the way that we share content online, and they have made it extremely simple to do that and pick the specific people we want to share such content with. Access is rolling out slowly too, because at the moment it is invite-only, which is creating massive hype online by making it very exclusive.
But ultimately, Plus is a weapon in Google’s search arsenal. Google plans to revolutionise search by making it more social. As you add friends to your Circles on Plus and your Friends Plus 1 search results and links, it will promote them in your Google search results. Also, as you group up your friends into circles and start sharing content, it will learn what kind of things you and your friends are likely to search for and will alter your search results according to this. This will also be used for bringing up relevant ads using AdSense. At the moment, these features haven’t all rolled out yet, but no doubt they will when they are open to the public. So when it comes to SEO in the future, having a social media platform for your business is going to help with your online marketing campaign.
Google has done the smart thing by only including some of the features at launch to make it simpler. Get the users used to using the software and slowly add new features. After they open it to the public, they will start adding features such as docs integration and calendar functions. The growth of signups has been amazing, already gaining 10 million users in under two weeks. Only time will tell if it’s going to be a real competitor for Facebook and Twitter.